Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 05:32:58PM -0500, Gary Thorpe wrote:
>>>Ashok Shrestha wrote:
>>>>>I mounted part of RAM as such:
>>>>>>mdmfs -s 500m md /mnt
>>>>>>Then put WRKDIRPREFIX=/path/to/md in /etc/make.conf.
>>>>>>It substantially reduces compile time by about 5-10 times.
>>>>>>>>>Thanx to all ur replies.
>>>>>>-Ashok Shrestha
>>>>An alternative is to try using the "-pipe" flag with GCC: this
>>eliminates the need to use some temporary files by using a unix pipe for
>>IPC. Setting another flag "-j 2" will allow 2 jobs to be done at the
>>same time and should eliminate (by hiding) the I/O delays (this slows
>>down the CPU slightly because of more task switches, but even with one
>>job there are still lots of generated tasks).
>>> -j is not safe to use with port builds since many ported software
> contain race conditions in the build.
>> Kris
This effectively means that you cannot take advantage of SMP to compile
FreeBSD's ports collection. That sounds like a big
limitation...especially for people trying to speed up bulk builds.
Is "-pipe" still a good idea? It should provide a significant
performance boost, if the process is spending a lot of time doing disk
I/O, without using up a lot of memory.